Oh geez, I thought as I answered my office phone, first thing this morning. A PR call at eight a.m.? The young man on the phone was trying to sell me on writing a column about his company’s career-path-calculating software. This was not the call I would have picked to start my day, but the universe is in charge, not me, so I gritted my teeth and stuck with it.

“You know,” I said, “I’m not a fan of instruments and assessments that purport to tell people what they should do for a living.” The young man halted in his pitchman’s spiel. “What?” he asked. “Don’t you think an instrument like ours will do a better job of picking a person’s career path than the person will do, himself?”

“I think that may appear to be true,” I said, “only because it is very hard for most of us (perhaps all of us) to get outside ourselves enough to have a clear perspective on our own situations. However, our friends do a great job of telling us what we’re good at and where we shine. When we can take time to listen to our creative right brains and our bodies, listen to our friends and think about where we’re happiest at work, we can pick perfectly wonderful career paths. I don’t trust any algorithm to do that work. That’s about as human a task as we could imagine. Why would we entrust it to an equation?”

The poor young man was stunned. I could almost hear him asking himself “What kind of hippie career columnist have I chanced on today?” I wasn’t especially sympathetic, since I’ve written reams over the years about this very topic. It would have behooved the young PR guy to read a couple of those columns before pitching me on a story about a product I wouldn’t recommend if it were free (which it’s not). The poor dude was nearly undone by my polite non-excitement about his company’s newest offering. “But – but – I mean,” he stammered, “don’t you have faith in technology?”

I have faith in technology like no one’s business. I love technology when it’s powering Google Maps (not Apple Maps) and letting me make transfers between bank accounts, or when it’s helping surgeons during delicate surgeries or doing any of the other things technology does so well. I don’t trust technology any further than I can throw it when it’s using machine logic to tell people how to invest their precious time and brainpower (not to mention emotional fuel). That’s about the worst use anyone could imagine for technology. What algorithm could tell us more about ourselves than our own trusty gut, our daydreams and our trusted friends?

“Look at it this way,” I said to the young man. “What if your product were designed to tell people whom they should marry? What if the software let people answer questions, and spit out an answer that said ‘You should marry a Greek person between 38 and 40 years old, who’s a graphic designer and used to live in Chicago?’ Would you take the advice the software application gave you, and go looking for a mate like that?”

“It’s a completely different situation,” said the young man. “I am sorry to push back on that,” I said, “but I think it’s exactly the same.”

Your work is not just a way to pay the rent, in the ideal case. It’s your life’s work, and it deserves much more than your physical presence eight or nine hours a day. You deserve more from your work than the title and the paycheck, certainly. You deserve an opportunity to plug into your power source, the channel that lets you be as creative or intellectually curious or charged-up as you want to be, every day. How is an electronic quiz (or paper-and-pencil quiz, for that matter) going to tell you that the universe wants you to work in plastics extrusion or the apparel industry, such that you’d shift your priorities around to make that happen? No one can give you a career-direction “Aha!” like another human being, or two or three of them who know you and can focus on your talents and quirks, working in concert with your own God-given instincts and life experience.

One of the benefits of the years we accumulate on earth (I just hit age 53 on New Year’s eve, so accumulated time is top-of-mind for me) is that as those years pile up on top of each other, we start to learn about situations and people we’re meant to move toward and others we’re best to step away from. If we wouldn’t trust an algorithm to pick the city we should live in or the person we should marry, why would we trust an algorithm to tell us which career path to pursue?

Unfortunately, there are those who *do* trust technology to tell them whom to marry. Ever hear of eHarmony? And they’re going to expand into the job matching front as a competitor to the company that called you!

You have clearly made your point there. Why do we need to spend money in determining our passion if we know it already inside our hearts. Its just a manner of time that we will discover what we love doing. Unfortunately, there are also people who rely on this technology because they’re too lazy to think about what their passionate about.

Liz, my daughter is a freshman in high school here in Colorado. We just obtained the results from an exploratory standardized test she took before the holidays. Based on her scores and on her answers to an interest inventory battery, the test shows my daughter should go to college and pursue a career dealing with “data and things” (as opposed to “people” or “ideas”). The brainwashing starts early!

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